


Jeder Engel ist schrecklich

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Doom (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-09
Updated: 2005-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:46:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1639697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>O gently, gently, show him the love that adheres to a calm, everyday task, -- lead him close to the garden, given him those nights that even out the scales</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jeder Engel ist schrecklich

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Nihilist

 

 

_Verhalt ihn......_

Her throat was tight and constricted, full of the change radiating from her neck out. Her skin pulsed, like a heart beat, throbbing harder and harder, each spasm moving to a different part of her body. She felt hot, feverish, and with each shock, each wave of torture, she welcomed it and the strength that came with it. She could feel the burn of her muscles, bulking up larger, her breasts tightening and shrinking into her chest surrounded by hard muscle. Most of all, she felt the ache in her stomach. A gaping maw, gasping and salivating, wanting to devour. She was _so_ hungry and the darkness in her mind - her soul - urged her to eat anything, everything, anyone in her path. It was so easy, with her claws and fangs, to sink her teeth into the flesh and taste the heartbeat that was pounding in the next room.

Samantha Grimm woke up screaming, clutching at her neck, for the fourth night in a row since her UAC quarantine ended. She'd been unconscious and bleeding, her arm broken and leg split open, with her ribs cracked when John carried her out of the Arc facility. They'd been separated almost immediately for debriefing and she hadn't had a chance to protest, to explain to John not to tell. She needed time to work on C24 properly. With real trials, safety guards, a proper scientific study. C24 was the greatest discovery to come out of Olduvai; it was an even more wondrous discovery than Lucy, her child and the Arc combined. That Dr. Carmack, as unethical as his methods and use of human experimentation had been, had managed to extract the chromosome from Lucy's DNA and transform it into a usable compound was a phenomenal breakthrough.

John was the culmination of that. Bulkier muscles, faster response times, his already keen intellect had been honed so that he had better retention rates and learned faster and more efficiently. John was part of Mars now.

Sam rubbed her neck lightly, watching the door and counting. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand, six one -

"Sam?"

As he had for the last four nights, John stood at the door of her small bedroom, with one of the small handheld semiautomatics. It was the easiest weapon for him to smuggle off base in Twentynine Palms before he had joined her here. She knew, in the way she had always been able to sense him even as children, that he wished for something bigger, more concrete to hold in his hands. Sometimes, after the nightmares, she wanted to open her mouth and just tell him any threat on Earth, anything that might happen, he wouldn't need a gun to handle. Not anymore. But she couldn't make the words come out of her mouth. "John." Her voice sounded raspy and hoarse to her ears, abused from restless nights and shortened screams. The second night, John had slept in a chair in her bedroom, waking her every time she seemed restless. The dreams still came and in each of them the tongue that had so narrowly missed in reality attached to her neck and infected her. "Just another dream. You should go back to bed."

She knew it was a useless command. He'd sat up with her until she'd finally fallen back into a restless sleep or decided to get up and experiment in her lab. Her UAC provided housing here in Nevada wasn't much. But considering how little she was here and how easily the on-site lab they'd provided to her specifications when she'd first taken the job at Olduvai modified so she could study the full range of changes in John before his leave was over and he had to report to his new team it, Sam knew she shouldn't complain. It was private and quiet and there was room enough for both of them to heal. She'd begged John to try and find a way out of his enlistment -- surely even the Privatized Marines couldn't expect him to perform after what had happened on Olduvai? - but he had said no. His enlistment was nearly up anyway; she would have another chance to convince him then.

John just tilted his head to the right and grimaced, the way he always did when he wasn't pleased, and leaned against her door jam. "You know I'm not going to do that, Sam."

She did know. She knew from experience: her experience over the last four days with him and her experience from a childhood with him. He was so drastically changed now, harder, leaner, angry and haunted in ways that made her heart ache, but still the same John that stood guard against her nightmares. "I still have to say it."

That made him smile, however briefly, and the gun disappeared. She was still unsure exactly how he did that when wearing only a pair of blue boxers. Maybe he just moved so fast she couldn't see the motion as he put it away. Once it was gone -- he knew how little she liked guns -- John stepped into the room and dropped down into the chair next to her bed.

Sam rolled over onto her side so she was facing him, folding the pillow over in two so her ear wasn't pressed directly against the case and impeding her hearing. "I'm the older twin, John. You should be the one screaming and I should be the one watching over you."

"I have more experience with monsters." He was sitting up so straight, so upright that she was reminded of their childhood. No, that wasn't quite right. If the death of their parents hadn't ended their childhood, then the frantic shuffling, after the agony of the funeral, to find them a new home had. It was the school they'd ended up at that his posture reminded her of. Both of them, at ten, separated into different educational tracks "for their own good," years younger than their high school classmates and years ahead of their teachers, had left them alone and adrift. Sam worked hard, studying to become a forensic archeologist like their parents. John had become a wooden block. He sat, without speaking, he didn't read or study biology - his passion before their death - and he only did enough work to get by at a bare minimum. He ran, alone, for long periods of time. He'd been fighting demons even then, hadn't he? All by himself, he'd fought monsters, protecting her from her nightmares even then.

"I suppose you do." He was the better half of them. Twins, she had read, in many cultures were considered to share a soul. If that was so, Olduvai and afterward had proven which half of the soul was his: the good half. "Come to bed, John," she told him, drawing back the covers the way she had when he'd come to her bedroom as children for comfort.

Perhaps if she moved close enough, she could breathe in pieces of his soul and the monsters within her own would retreat.

 


End file.
